Dissolving the old Oki and refounding it as a second company (1949)

Winding a company up as a way of rebuilding it

The 1949 decision was less a strategy chosen by management than a piece of processing — the move available within a framework set by the cancellation of wartime compensation and the Enterprise Reconstruction and Reorganization Act. Even so, the procedure — sealing the losses inside the old account, making shareholders and creditors carry them, remaking the legal entity itself and moving the business into a new vessel — was a different settlement from seeking survival while still shouldering the debt. Kambe Suteji’s judgment, which went as far as publishing the names of those to be cut, can be seen as what created the room for the high dividends and capital spending that followed. It was a rebuilding that fixed the distribution of pain first.

On the other hand, some things could not be cut away. A stable set of buyers — the public telephone corporation and government offices — brought certain orders through the recovery years and at the same time fixed low margins into the structure. The constraint Yamamoto Masaaki described in 1969 reappears in changed form as the DRAM dependence of the 1990s and the NTT dependence of the 2000s. Even winding the company up to travel light did not liquidate the question of who it sells what to — Oki’s fresh start sets the premise against which every later decision has to be read.